That should be an easy question to answer given she has a town named after her — Fanwood — and an annual event in her honor — Fanny Wood Day, to be held tomorrow. But no one, with any certainty, can really say.

Was she Miss Fanny Wood, who’d ride the train out from New York, sit under a great Oak tree and write glowing poems about the area’s beauty?

Perhaps. That’s the story the borough’s website tells.

Was she, as others have said, the privileged daughter of a railroad president who liked to name stations after his family members?

Could be. That was the version chronicled by the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s.

Or maybe she never existed.

That’s what seems most likely, locals say. There’s simply no clear, documented evidence there was a Fanny Wood from whom the borough drew its name.

"The rest of us have been searching for many years for anything she ever wrote, for any of her DNA or anything else," said George Weiss, who runs the borough’s TV station and fashions himself a local historian. "So, it is the legend of Fanny Wood."

It’s a fascinating story whose origins are obscure and versions plentiful. It seems some imaginative local worked up this yarn a long time ago and, through a game of telephone and decades of passing, it took on a life of its own.

View full sizeTony Kurdzuk/The Star-LedgerHistorian and Fanwood resident Joe Nagy looks at an old map of the town as he talks about the mystery of "Fanny Wood."

Tomorrow, the borough will host its 17th annual Fanny Wood Day. The event draws some 10,000 people from surrounding towns and has, in the past, featured actresses dressed as "Fanny Wood."

The mystery of the woman is about as charming as the small borough itself. Situated in the southwestern corner of Union County, it’s a picturesque version of small-town suburbia, home to about 7,300 people. It’s a place where, for many years, police were dispatched not to addresses but to "so-and-so’s home." It’s a place where, after a snowfall, the plow drivers used to leave one hilly road covered in white so the kids could sled.

Originally part of Fanwood Township founded in the 1870s, the borough broke off in 1895, creating a new community that encircled the train station. The township became Scotch Plains.

It was the Fanwood Train Station and the Central Railroad of New Jersey that helped build up the area, according to Joseph Nagy, historian to the borough’s historic preservation commission. Perhaps it’s only fitting the Fanny Wood stories involve the tracks.

The tale of the railroad president’s daughter seems to have more muster than that of the poet, though in a slightly different form. As part of the Public Works Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project — an effort to employ white-color workers during the Great Depression — Emily de Forest, said to be the daughter of railroad president John Taylor Johnston, wrote of her family history. She said it was her mother, Fanny, whom her father named the area for. And she said he also named a Middlesex County community for her mother’s friend Ellen Betts.

"He took her first name and added the prefix ‘Dun’ because he thought it would be a very euphonious name," she said.

But the local historians laugh at the premise. They say neither de Forest nor her mother had the surname Wood, and every lead they chase down turns into a dead end.

"Running these parts down, you’d be chasing your tail," said Nagy, who talked of the legend while sitting in the old train station, now a museum.

If none of the stories is true, then where in the world did the name Fanwood come from? The answer may be simple, said Anthony Parenti, a councilman and the borough’s former police chief. Looking at maps from the late 1700s — long before Johnston was around — he spotted some interesting terms.

"You’ll see where it says the west fields, the plain fields and it says the fan woods," Parenti said. "That’s most likely the truest story you’ll find of how Fanwood got it’s name."